Thursday, 18 January 2018

Liz studied Biochemistry and Genetics at the University of Nottingham before going on to complete her Sainsbury-funded PhD at the John Innes Centre, Norwich. She worked as a plant genetics researcher at the University of Cambridge before moving to Sheffield in 2014. Liz is now a lecturer in the MBB department here at UoS.

What is the brewing project all about?

During level three, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (MBB) students undertake a 20 credit research project (MBB360) which forms the cornerstone of their final year studies. There are several types of projects offered by the MBB department including experimental, teaching and clinical diagnostics. In 2017-18 we offered an authentic industrial biotechnology experience in collaboration with Claire Monk of Welbeck Abbey Brewery.

Wednesday, 29 November 2017

In March 2017, I was the recipient of an Enterprise Educators UK Richard Beresford Bursary that allowed me to explore different ways of ‘embedding enterprise in the curriculum’ at the Universities of Sheffield in South Yorkshire and Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain. My investigation involved two cities, both in regions steeped in industrial heritage; and two universities steeped in innovative approaches to teaching, clearly defined social/civic responsibility, and two views on enterprise.

Monday, 30 October 2017

What is a word? From the early days of linguistics, Saussure (1959) identified that words are signs: they map a particular written representation or spoken sound ('signifier') to a meaning in the mind of the listener ('signified'). This relationship breaks down for us as enterprise educators when we use the words ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’. Our audiences relate those terms to business and start-up, and so define them much more narrowly than we would as enterprise educators. As a result, they rightly challenge the relevance of our offer when most students don’t want to start their own venture.

To overcome this challenge, we need to step back. Linguistic signs need to form a meaningful message in the mind of our audience. So, our real challenge is to ensure that our audiences get our intended meaning.

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

[This is a guest blog written for us by Pauline Narvas. We asked her to tell us about the impact that experiencing enterprise in the curriculum has had on her personally.]

Bio: Hi, I’m Pauline! I have a lot of hats but in summary, I am: a Biomedical Sciences student, an old-school blogger, a front-end developer, a former communications intern, a women in STEM advocate, HackMed hackathon organiser and a coding instructor at Code First: Girls.

My experience

The Organ Donation Project was a project that made up a small part of my ‘Introduction to Human Anatomy’ module in my second year of my Biomedical Sciences degree. I was put into a group with others in my course, where I then took the role of team leader for the project. My role was to delegate tasks to other team members and think of creative, ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas to engage young students to sign up for the organ donation register, using our anatomical knowledge.

Thursday, 10 August 2017

In my last post, I invited readers to view the design of external partnerships for learning and teaching through the lens of Lean Startup methodology (Ries 2011), based upon the development of USE's 'Making Ideas Happen' (MIH) module.

To recap: in considering whether it would be beneficial to use external partners, designers of a learning experience need to ask:

“Should we use external partnerships for this project?”

And if so:

“How can we use them in a way that is both sustainable and manageable?”

We considered our first 'customer' segment - students. But of course, we only scratched the surface of this approach, and I now want to turn my focus to our other key 'customer' - the external partner.

Monday, 31 July 2017

The Enterprise Academy team is chiefly known, and widely recognised for, the support we provide to academic colleagues to embed enterprise in their specific subject curricula. USE does, however, have well-established, in-house teaching and assessment responsibilities.

Unlike everything else we do, MIH is not embedded enterprise. True embedded enterprise uses a core subject discipline as a vehicle for enterprise capability (EC) development (and vice versa), MIH's vehicle for EC development, on the other hand, is entrepreneurship education, with a firm focus on fulfilling social aims.

Embedded or not, however, the work we've undertaken on MIH feeds greatly into our work with academics.